Email marketing sites like Mail Chimp or Constant Contact have great reporting functionality built in to let you monitor the open rates, bounce backs and click through rates from your campaigns. Use the given industry standard metrics with a pinch of salt – they are useful as a passing interest – set your own.

Websites traffic, both visitors getting to your site and then moving around within your site, can be analsyed with Google Analytics which is free and hard to beat.

Events can be measured by the number and quality* of sales leads generated and ultimately converted.

*At Learning Pool we use a simple % system to qualify our sales leads:

100% qualified (payment received)

80% qualified (processing purchase order)

60% qualified (verbal confirmation of order)

40% qualified (favoured solution)

20% qualified (qualified prospect and we are being considered)

10% qualified (suspect)

Some things are harder to measure:

PR – do you measure column inches, comments or coverage? How do you quantify the influence of the coverage you get?

Sponsorship – how do you quantify the eyeballs? And how likely is it that those who do see your sponsorship will buy your product?

Promotional spend – which of your pens, balloons or mugs will be the biggest influencer (in a favourable way) and which will go straight in the bin?

I think that there are so many vagaries involved in trying to measure the hard things that this is where you easily get into the navel gazing.

Instead you could measure your reach to quantify and track how many people you’re interacting with.

Your reach could be quantified as the number of :

Twitter followers

Facebook fans

Linked in connections

YouTube subscribers

YouTube views

Flickr views

Mailing lists sign ups

And you should aim to grow your reach on a monthly basis.

Once you have people interacting with you, ie you’ve got them into your funnel, that’s when you start to have a conversation with them to qualify them. However, more on this in another post.

Thanks for reading. What do you think should be measured and how do you do it?

2 thoughts on “Measuring your marketing effectiveness”

One of my quirkier ways of measuring Learning Pool’s success & reach is by making a mental note of the number of people that ask me for jobs every month (although regrettably not in sales – as anyone that’s read my recent blog on this will know).

It makes me happy that we are the sort of organisation that other people want to be part of.